Marketing silos can lead to scattered efforts that diminish efficiency and hurt the customer experience. As the owner of brand messaging and strategic communication, marketing leaders must break down these barriers to streamline operations and improve information sharing and collaboration.
There’s tangible incentive for eliminating silos: A 2023 Accenture survey found that companies with strong collaboration between marketing and other functions saw up to 4 percent more revenue growth than their peers.
Breaking down marketing silos often starts with removing data silos that inhibit information sharing. This is where generative AI can help.
GenAI As The Accelerant For Data-Driven Collaboration
Data fragmentation is a bane to marketers. Integrating GenAI with data analytics tools and platforms can make it easier to query, analyze, and share data from disparate sources—including sales, customer service, and product development. The chatbot capabilities in many GenAI tools can make the dashboard more accessible to different teams.
Generative AI “allows seamless engagement and cross-collaboration … by breaking silos in a meaningful way,” Deep Ratna Srivastav, SVP, Head of AI and Digital Transformation at Franklin Templeton, said in an interview with CDO Magazine.
Instead of marketers having to manually collect data from different sources, analyze it, and build reports from any insights they might find, they can ask a chatbot a few questions and let GenAI gather the relevant data, perform an analysis to pull out key insights, and generate multiple reports for different stakeholders.
“That kind of power did not exist in the past,” Srivastav said. “That’s where decision makers can start connecting silos, and it can happen at a small tactical level or at a very strategic level.”
Integrating AI and BI
Analytics and business intelligence vendors are rushing to add GenAI capabilities to their platforms and tools. For example, Pyramid has added GenAI capabilities to its BI platform, allowing users to use natural-language queries to analyze data and generate reports for different stakeholders. Similarly, MicroStrategy has integrated AI technology into its MicroStrategy ONE BI platform to make it easier for non-technical users to quickly find the information they need.
“When integrated with AI capabilities, [BI platforms] can deliver relevant insights to users within their existing applications and workflows,” Saurabh Abhyankar, EVP and chief product officer for MicroStrategy, wrote in a recent blog post. “This new approach to BI goes beyond traditional dashboard-centric models, utilizing powerful data models and no-code web interfaces to provide contextual intelligence in real-time.”
The ability of GenAI and natural language processing (NLP) technology to gather and analyze both structured and unstructured data is a big step in eliminating data silos.
“NLP is able to decipher unstructured data such as social media posts, pre-processing the data to create structured data which can then be used for analysis,” Scott Clark notes in an article for CMSwire. “NLP is able to quickly standardize mass amounts of unstructured data into actionable information.”
Moving Toward A Unified Future
Reducing data and operational silos should be a top priority for marketing leaders, as organizations seek every advantage to address customers’ changing expectations. By integrating AI into existing platforms, processes, and workflows, marketing teams can improve information sharing and encourage more transparent teamwork, which will eventually improve CX and spur growth.
